Did Belief in Gods Lead to Mayan Demise?

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A dread of malevolent spirits haunting forsaken areas could,
along with environmental catastrophes, help to explain why some
areas in the ancient Mayan world proved less resilient than
others when their civilization disintegrated, researchers
suggest.

The
ancient Maya once claimed an area about the size of Texas,
with cities and fields that occupied what is now southern Mexico
and northern Central America, including the countries of
Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and Honduras. The height of the
Mayan civilization, known as the Classic period, extended from
approximately A.D. 250 to at least 900.

For unknown reasons, the Classic Mayan civilization then
collapsed. The population declined catastrophically to a fraction
of its former size, and many of their great cities were left
mostly abandoned for the jungle to reclaim.

Scientists have long drawn connections between the decline of the
ancient Maya and environmental catastrophes,
especially drought. Deforestation linked with farming could
also have triggered disaster — for instance, reduced tree cover
of the ground would have led to loss of fertile topsoil by
erosion, as well as greater evaporation of water by sunlight,
exacerbating drought.

However, while some locales remain abandoned for long periods,
others recovered more quickly. This patchwork pattern of recovery
might argue against environmental catastrophes being the sole
determining factor behind the
collapse of the Classic Mayan civilization — if they were,
one might expect such catastrophes to affect all areas equally.

Moreover, archaeologists have pointed out that
ancient Mayan societies may have been vulnerable to collapse
by their very nature. They apparently funneled wealth to a small
ruling elite topped by hereditary divine kings, who had virtually
unlimited power but whose subjects expected generosity — a string
of military defeats or seasonal droughts could greatly damage
their credibility. The stability of this system was further
threatened by polygamy among rulers, spawning numerous lineages
that warred against each other, overall generating conditions
ripe for collapse.

To learn more about the reasons behind the patchy apocalypse and
recovery, scientists focused on social declines seen in the
terminal part of the Classic period in the Mayan lowlands,
ranging from A.D. 750 to 950. They also looked at downturns from
A.D. 100 to 250, the terminal part of the "Pre-Classic" period.
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Available data suggested the elevated parts of the Mayan
lowlands, which include much of today's Yucatan Peninsula, were
significantly more vulnerable to collapse and less likely to
recover than lower-lying areas. Sites within this elevated region
lacked perennial water sources and were more dependent solely on
what rainwater they could capture and store, leaving them
vulnerable to shifts in climate. In contrast, neighboring
lower-lying areas had access to springs, perennial streams and
sinkholes
known as cenotes that were often filled with water.

Reoccupying elevated interior areas with large numbers of people
would require intense labor to re-establish water management
systems, helping to explain why they were left abandoned, the
researchers noted. In contrast, dwelling in the neighboring,
low-lying areas was less challenging, and evidence suggests that
sites there were typically occupied continuously even when the
major political and economic networks they were linked with
collapsed.

At the same time, the Classic Maya would have implicated gods and
their "divine" rulers for the collapse. In that way, their
abandoned territories became thought of as chaotic,
haunted places, and reclaiming any lands from the forest was
at best done with great care and ritual. Survivors in outlying
sites may often not have bothered. "Reoccupation called for a
reordering of a most profound kind," the researchers write in the
March 6 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences.

"I have little doubt that droughts and environmental degradation
— for example, soil erosion or declining soil fertility — played
roles in the collapse, defined here as a substantial and
prolonged decline in population, of some sites or regions," said
researcher Nicholas Dunning, a geographer at the University of
Cincinnati. "There is also the important role played by the
environmental setting of sites — for example, sites in the
elevated interior region were significantly more vulnerable to
drought cycles than those in surrounding lower-elevation areas
where water was more abundant."

"But the fact that collapse was often a patchwork affair and a
prolonged process does indeed strongly suggest that cultural
factors — for example, strength of rulership, flexibility of the
society and its ability to adapt to change — were equally
important for determining whether or not a given site or group of
sites adapted or collapsed," Dunning told LiveScience.

Dunning's colleagues included Timothy Beach of Georgetown
University and Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach of George Mason University.

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